Thursday, 16 April 2009

2 Life at Flag

Scientology describes
its Flag Land Base in Florida as “The Friendliest Place in the Whole World”.
New recruit Maureen Bolstad got a very different impression.

Maureen Bolstad agreed to sign the billion-year
contract for Scientology’s Sea Organization because of the promises her
recruiter had made her – none of which were ever kept, she said.

He told her she would be able to finish high school;
that she would get regular visits home; and be trained in Scientology skills
that would help her mentally ill mother.

But as she was still a minor, the recruiter still
needed to get her mother to consent to her joining the Sea Org.

“He took me to my apartment and got my mother to sign
a parental consent form – and my mother was completely drunk, she was just
sitting on the couch.”

When her little brother found out what was going on,
he insisted on joining too. So her mother ended up signing consent forms for
them both.

Bolstad was barely 16 at the time; her brother, just
14.

Within 24 hours, they had left their home in
California and flown to Flag Land Base at Clearwater, Florida – also known as
Flag.

To talk her out of going to high school, her superiors
painted a frightening picture of a world dominated by the dogma of evil
psychiatrists.

“It made the outside world seem so horrible and scary
– full of evil. I felt, ‘Wow, I’m safer now because I’m away from all these
things in society that are actually the cause of everything.’”

Rather than let her complete her high school education
then, she was put to work doing laundry and cleaning at the base. Her brother
became a runner, delivering messages between the different offices.

“I had to stay up until about four o’clock in the
morning ironing people’s shirts. It was ridiculous because I wasn’t really
getting any sleep,” she recalled. “And then I’d have to get up at 7.30 to go to
work the next day.”

“The Friendliest Place…

Scientology describes Flag Land Base
as “The Friendliest Place in the Whole World”.

But one thing Bolstad quickly had to get used to was
being shouted at a lot. “It was actually pretty shocking," she recalled.
"I was getting yelled at every time I made a mistake.”

In an October 1968 policy letter, Scientology’s
founder L. Ron Hubbard wrote about something called ethics presence. “As an
executive you get compliance because you have ethics presence and persistence
and can get mad,” he wrote.

Bolstad put it another way: “You’re taught that if
someone knows that you are going to yell at them if they do it wrong, then they
are going to be more motivated to do it correctly.”

This kind of macho management was nothing new.

In aJuly 1994 Internet postingformer scientologist Dennis Erlich describes two particularly aggressive
officers he came across back in 1976, when Flag had just opened,

One of them, he recalled, “made a habit of getting up
on a chair and screaming his lungs out at individual interns… Students would
hear him and go silent with terror at the thought of having to confront [his]
wrath…”

And he was the nice guy, wrote Erlich.

The other officer “was famous for getting right up
inches from your face, poking you in the chest and screaming ‘PIG SHIT!’ when
he didn't like your answer to his questions and wanted to show his disgust for
you.”

Several former Sea Org members say this kind of
drill-sergeant behaviour was the norm at Flag. Some even said you had to
cultivate it if you wanted to get on there (seeAbuse in the Sea Org elsewhere on this site).

Bolstad did not take well to this regime: it shook her
up so much she only made more mistakes. But her boss did not draw the obvious
conclusion.

“She didn’t attribute it to her yelling – she just
said I was a Potential Trouble Source, because I had accidents.”

A Potential Trouble Source is a Scientology term
meaning someone who is in contact with a suppressive person, one of those
inherently destructive people Hubbard designated as the root of all evil.

Clearly, Bolstad just wasn’t getting it: so her boss
put her on the running program.

The Running Program

In 1982, when Bolstad experienced
it, the running program – or Cause Resurgence Rundown – was something that
Hubbard was still developing.

Scientology’s literature describes it as “a special
program that can bring about a tremendous boost to one’s levels of cause and
control.” Some of its veterans describe it as a living hell.

Bolstad had it relatively easy. “I was on the Running
Program for five hours a day,” she recalled. “There was travel time to and from
the park where we put up the pole and there were some bathroom breaks and
water-drinking breaks.”

With about four hours of actual running daily, she
reckoned she was covering about 12 miles – and she thrived on it. “Of course,
being 16 years old, running around a pole was actually fun,” she added.

But some of the older people running beside her were
clearly suffering, she recalled. “They were just trying to get through it.”

Some 25 years later, former member Marc Headley
described how the program worked at the International Base, in Hemet,
California.

In those days, wrote Headley in aSeptember 2007Internet posting, you ran around a pole in the searing California heat
to the point of exhaustion. Then after a few minutes rest, you started again.

Inmates had to run at least five hours a day – though
eight to ten hours was preferred – and the program could last for weeks, he
wrote.

Things improved for Bolstad when she was put to work
studying Scientology materials. For one thing, she started getting more sleep,
because you were not meant to go into any therapy session without having slept
properly.

And with her $30 a week pay, she was able to
supplement the communal meals with fresh fruit and protein bars.

So although she was still working or studying 16 hours
a day, seven days a week, she began to feel better.

Even her boss’s screaming fits
stopped bothering her.

“When I was on this running program
I actually felt I was feeling stronger, the exercise was making me happier – so
when she yelled at me it didn’t bother me any more.

“I felt better and I also realised
that she wasn’t mad at me – she was just mad. That was something I didn’t
notice before. I noticed she yelled at everybody.”

By now, Bolstad was being trained up
for the Commodore’s Messenger Org (CMO), a group of youngsters who acted as the
founder’s personal aides (Hubbard had by this time promoted himself to the rank
of Commodore).

She was kitted out in the standard
Sea Org uniform: dark-coloured shoes and slacks and an ironed white shirt with
a blue-and-gold lanyard, the colours designating her as a member of the CMO.

The CMO was something special, even
inside the Sea Org, said Bolstad.

“You are taught there that basically
you are an emissary of the Commodore and if other staff members don’t show you
the respect that they would show L. Ron Hubbard then that’s wrong and you have
to correct them on that.”

At 16, going on 17, she was not
completely comfortable demanding respect from people old enough to be her
parents. “Personally I don’t think that was very healthy for me as a kid to
demand respect from older people.”

But she got that respect.

Then, out of the blue, she got promoted
to the International Base at Hemet, California.

---

For
a more extreme version of the running program, see David Mayo’s account in A History of Violence, elsewhere
on this site.

4 comments:

This is by far the best work on the realities of The Church of Scientology I've ever seen, anywhere.I've seen this Church from the inside bottom to top, as a Staff Member in Canada to Flag for six months, an involvement spanning 18 years.It's a Cult AND a legitimate Religion; It's correct and good in many ways, yet wrong and incurably bad. It's violently evil and extraordinarily dangerous. Yet again, still holds powerful keys to greater understandings (Freedom) and philosophical truths the World has never pondered. In short; Scientology is a complete paradox.Why is that? Two words: David Miscavige.I've been thinking of publishing a book called, what else?? 'Knowledge Report: David Miscavige.' ... The rise and fall of Scientology.'There are too many good people, Scientologists, victimized by the simple lack of what can not be suppressed: A Knowledge Report. (the truth)It's not hope we need. It is Justice for all.Great wonderful priceless work. Thank you.J Anthony

Some think that it was just some people misunderstanding and misapplying Hubbard that caused all Scientology's problems. That is incorrect. You can trace the behaviour of these people directly to the various source documents of Hubbard himself. His deranged mentality is at the root of Scientology. In no way is it peripheral.

About the Author

Jonny Jacobsen is the author of the Infinite Complacency website tracking violence and abuse in Scientology and also contributes to Tony Ortega's Underground Bunker on the same subject.. He trained as a journalist in the late 1980s with the Birmingham Post and Mail group and spent several years freelancing in Scotland before moving to Paris in 1994, where he is still based. His first investigative piece on Scientology was in 1996 as a reporter/producer with Radio France International. You can reach him at jonnymcj(AT)hotmail.com.

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A Piece of Blue Sky

Click on the image to order the new edition of Jon Atack's definitive history of Hubbard-era Scientology. To learn more about the battle to get the original version published read "Atack Unchained" below.

For the Record

I approached Scientology several times to get their response to the allegations set out in the first section, "Violence and abuse in the Sea Org" regarding David Miscavige's violence and the abuse at the International Base: nothing so far.

Unless otherwise specified, all quotes come from interviews with the author.

Don't get me started: If you want to know why I write about Scientology, read this account published in Scotland's Sunday Herald on November 8, 2009. Since they never properly formatted it on their website I've also posted it here, in a slightly more readable form.

The Paris Trial: In answer to a question from a reader: these are my first-hand reports from the court, not a round-up of the French press coverage.